Virilio’s The Art of the Motor

I’ve decided that I’m going to think about this in terms of major concepts rather than go page by page.

Art of the Motor: Title, hence important term.  First appears in “The Data Coup D’Etat”:
“The communications industry would never have got where it is today had it not started out as an art of the motor capable of orchestrating the perpetual shif of appearances” (23).  In thinking about this conept, Virilio sets up how motorized communications alter reality even as they claim to present reality.  Key to understanding this concept is two terms, Mediatization and similarly, “The Shrinking Effect”

These two terms are very closely related.  Very early on in the book, Virilio defines mediatization as it applied to the world before the 20th century: “Up until the twentieth century, to be mediatized mean literally being stripped of one’s immediate rights” (6).  He claims Napoleon I as the great “mediatizer” who took over areas but left the former leaders in a puppet role.  Each “ruler” seemed separate, individual, but they were all really just another part of Napoleon.  The many are really the one.

The same happens with mass communication, and the projector motor of the cinema becomes the symbol.  Virilio sets up the difference between the audience of a theatre production with that of a film.  While the theatre goers all see a different play due to positioning in th theatre – perspective, distance – the viewers of a film all see the film from the same perspective and distance.  The cinema “plunges inert cinemagoers into an unprecedented form of solitude, multiple solitude, since, as Marcel Pagnol so aptly puts it, a thousand spectators are reduced to one in the cinema auditorium!” (9).  The motor becomes the symbol of mediatization.  The audience in the twentieth century sees the world from one perspective, and this is problematic for Virilio because of the issues concerning who controls that perspective.

Mediatization occurs because of the “Shrinking Effect” of modern telecommunication technologies.  To get at this Virilio provides the history of the creation of the Republic of France.  The multitude of presses in Paris started the wave that shifted the focus of history in Virilio’s view:  “history was already completely turned toward the future, whisked along by the liberating power of the new media” (38).  Presses were publishing events about the future, what was to come (the arrest of Robespierre for instance).  But this is only a part of the equation: the multitude had to be controlled or there would simply be more uprising.  As Virilio points out “It is easier to fool a crowd than a single person” (38).  It is not insignificant that Virilio states this twice.  The “mulitple solitude” is incredibly important.   Virilio claims the optical telegraph as the first real new medium to effectively shrink the world in the various ways he means. 

It’s inventor, Chappe claims “The telegraph shrinks distances and in a way joins an entire huge population into a single point” (40).  Here we have both meanings of the term shrinking.  Shrinking the large population into the small, mediatization, and also shrinking large distances to ever smaller ones as communication speeds up.  People have contact with each other from great distances that were before measured by how long it took a person to travel from one place to another (in person or via letters that transported along with people).  With the telegraph, messages relayed without the people, effectively closing the gap as the messages received had much less distance to travel over land (think for a moment of the setup of the telegraph system.  One person sends a message on one end transmitted in various ways depending on the system to another station.  At that station, the message gets decoded and sent along to the interested parties.  The time of transmission is nearly instantaneous depending on the system, but it still has to travel from the station to the individual(s) concerned.  Thus distance is still there, but much shorter).

Newer media close the gap further and now instant (or nearly so) communication means there’s no distance effectively between people.  Because of this, Information becomes commodity in of itself and gains power.  At the same time  those who control (or in in reality create) the information becomes the leaders of this fourth estate.  The question then becomes, what constitutes information?

—-Pause: To be continued…

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